don't forget the songs of the great christian north american genocide. aproximately 90 million dead at the hands of those doing the devils work.

this was continued in the residential schools where the good christians allowed a fifty per cent death rate from disease neglect and malnutrition/ they put those sick with major comminicable diseases in the same beds with the healthy and beat the children unmercifully.

people of faith have a lot to answer for. we have ne need of a devil with people of faith to do his work.

ballad of the crow foot by willie dunn would be a good start--a great song about conquest and dispossession and the death of your own people at the hands of the totaslly unmerciful

Note from Joe Offer: I moved the first three messages of this thread from a thread titled Folk Music & Faith/A study in song. ollaimh makes a legitimate point that warrants discussion, but that discussion would interfere with the purpose of the original thread.

I guess ollaimh is referring to the extermination of Native Americans by the Europeans who conquered the Americas. It's unclear what was the aboriginal population of the Americas at the time of Columbus - estimates vary from ten million to 100 million, and it's unclear how many were killed in the early days of European conquest. I would suppose that the genocide hit its peak under the Americans of the 19th century, so those numbers would be different, added to those of the early conquest. There's no doubt that the Europeans were responsible for the deaths of millions of natives, and those deaths could rightly be termed a genocide. 90 million is certainly a credible number. Since most Europeans were Christians, I suppose you could blame the genocide on Christianity. Since most Europeans were right-handed, I suppose you could blame the genocide on right-handedness....or on the ability to see, or on their "white" skin, or on any number of the traits of Europeans. I tend to think that greed was the primary motivator in this genocide, not religious faith - although the greedy Europeans made use of every tool they could find to commit this genocide - including their religious faith. Still, it seems clear that the Europeans exterminated Native Americans for material gain, not primarily for religious purposes. It does seem to me that "landed" Europeans were more to blame for this genocide, not working-class Europeans. Still, even working-class European immigrants benefited from the conquest of the Americas - so if we are of European ancestry, we must share the blame. For that matter, all of us who live in the Americas, live on land stolen from those who were exterminated.

Could it be that ollaimh is of European ancestry, and is trying to find some way to deny his own share in the blame for this genocide? All of us of European ancestry who live on American land, must bear the major share share of the blame. And yes, there are many powerful songs about this genocide, and they need to be sung.

In 1966 Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns estimated on the basis of burial records, mainly in Peru, that between 90 and 100 million Native Americans in North and South America had died in the 250 years between 1500 and 1750.

That is, by several times, the highest estimate ever made by a reputable researcher. Its accuracy is problematic. Certainly many millions died who wouldn't have died otherwise (epidemiologists call such deaths "excess deaths").

It is generally believed that in the present-day United States, the Native population was about 600,000 in 1800. It had declined to about 250,000 a century later.

Dobyns (as well as others who argue for a much lower number of Native American deaths) agree that the overwhelming majority resulted from diseases, especially smallpox, which had been brought to the Americas by Europeans.

Nobody knew what caused smallpox or how it was spread. Though the Europeans realized that quarantine could hinder contagion, the Native Americans had no such knowledge.

Just what proportion of "excess" Native deaths were caused by uncontrolled epidemics and what proportion resulted from deliberate massacre is probably not knowable.

Bubonic plague killed off at least a quarter of the population of Europe in just a few years in the 1300s. The potential effects of smallpox in the Americas over a period of three and a half centuries would be hard to overestimate.

This thread has such a thought-provoking title. So Christianity is what drove the Cherokee to Oklahoma! And all this time I thought it was the U.S. Army.

I'll be sure to check to check my hymnbook tomorrow for songs celebrating the smallpox epidemics and the loss of the bison herds. Since the genocide was "Christian", I am sure there must be lots of them.

What fun to use the same principle for other national and ethnic crimes! Who needs to consider ideology, ethnic prejudice, nationalism, imperialism, greed, or just plain ol' human cussedness?! This way, no matter what happened, RELIGION gets the blame!

Let's see what we can come up with:

The Anglicans defeated the Roman Catholics at Waterloo.

On December 7, 1941, the Shintoists attacked Pearl Harbor.

During China's "Great Leap Forward", the atheists killed many millions of their countrymen.

Elsewhere in the Americas, Christian European colonists must have intermarried with indigenous people, judging from the fact that the population today is overwhelmingly of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry.

Maybe that's why the US government only took half of Mexico, i.e. since they're only half native.

"A lot of people say to me, "Why did you kill Christ?" "I dunno… it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know." "We killed him because he didn't want to become a doctor, that's why we killed him."

"I guess ollaimh is referring to the extermination of Native Americans by the Europeans who conquered the Americas. It's unclear what was the aboriginal population of the Americas at the time of Columbus - estimates vary from ten million to 100 million,"

ollaimh is so full of shit the mind boggles. There has been genocide, and fuck you European person. But, genocide is not the domain of people, it is the domain of governments.

quote: genocide is not the domain of people, it is the domain of governments

And that's the real reason behind separation of church and state: the church, with its moral principles, limited what governments could do. Morality aside, it's more efficient to wipe out the indigenous population and take their land, and use people from more technologically advanced cultures to work it. And government has more control over the imported people, since they're not tied to the land or to each other.

Eventual world domination by the US government was guaranteed by the founding fathers. They were all Masons, and they made sure their regime would never have to answer to any real church.